Thursday, July 3, 2014

Missing movies

Writing recently
in the UK Guardian newspaper,
prompted by the rediscovery of two lost Peter Sellers comedy shorts from the
1950s, Xan Brooks expresses his fascination at “the idea of the films that get
lost; that vast, teeming netherworld where the obscure and the unloved rub
shoulders, in the dark, with the misplaced and the mythic.” He notes: “Martin
Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that as many as 50% of the American movies
made before 1950 are now gone for good, while the British film archive is
similarly holed like Swiss cheese.” The British Film Institute has a section on
its website dedicated to the 75 most wanted British films, asking members of
the public as well as collectors and archivists to “check
attics and cellars, sheds and vaults” in search of Alfred Hitchcock’s second
film as a director, Errol Flynn’s screen debut, three early works by Michael
Powell, and seventy others. Although such attic searches would obviously be
extreme longshots, success from such measures wouldn’t be unprecedented; as
Brooks notes, if not for the storage room of a Norwegian psychiatric hospital,
the world wouldn’t have as complete a version as we do of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the
most highly prized films in history.

Where’s Parsifal (and who cares!?)

I entirely share Brooks’ fascination with
this aspect of cinema, of how it reminds us that even the swaggering industrial
stomp of the blockbuster is built from the most fragile of commodities,
transient successions of images; if we can shut out a film by closing our eyes,
then why shouldn’t the world send it into non-existence by turning its head.
Many of the lost films date back to more haphazard times – the missing Powell
movies for instance were 1930s “quickie” efforts that by all accounts barely
seemed to count for much even as they were being made, so it’s not hard to see
why everyone forgot to think about posterity. But others belong to the 60’s and
70’s, and the most recent is Where’s
Parsifal, a reportedly bizarre 1984 comedy featuring Tony Curtis, Peter
Lawford and Orson Welles (one commentator on the Internet Movie Database
suggests the film can actually be found on ancient Australian videotapes, but
maybe that’s no better than being lost in an attic).

Of course, momentary buzz aside, it’s a bit
strange to be excited by (for instance) the rediscovery of a lost Peter Sellers
film unless you’ve actually seen all the Peter Sellers films that are already
available, which I imagine not many people have. For virtually any star or
director you can name, a lot of the material that’s not actually lost might as
well be, given how difficult it is to access. I’ve written before how the
Internet has been a source of wonder in remedying some of this, albeit only in
a rather chaotic way. I was recently startled when Peter Watkins’ 1977 film Evening Land recently popped up on Mubi.com,
as I’d read in the past on Watkins’ own website that “The
only known surviving 35mm copies of this film (two) are in the archives of the Danish
Film Institute in Copenhagen. On rare occasions they may be loaned out to other
Cinematheques, though their quality is not the best.”

Evening Land

Since then, he provided an update that the
film was released on DVD in France, but nothing suggested it would be available
here any time soon. The Mubi print seemed to derive from a Toronto-based
distributor which has worked with Watkins in the past, Project X Distribution,
but its website hasn’t been updated since 2009. As I watched the film (the
quality of which looked fine), I couldn’t help thinking its reappearance might
be that of a phantom, capable of being snatched away at any moment.

I wrote about Watkins here several years
ago (you can find the article at http://torontomovieguy.blogspot.ca/2012/04/peter-watkins.html)
noting among other things that “his critique of
mass media malignity becomes ever more relevant as the standard of our public
discourse grinds relentlessly into greater trivia, shrouding the mass erosion
of quality of life and prospects for sustainability.” Evening Land fits entirely into that theme, taking what’s usually
termed a “docudrama” approach to depicting the (fictional) upheaval after a
Copenhagen shipyard signs a contract to build hulls for French atomic
submarines: the workers’ rights to strike and to other means of public protest
crashes into the immense governing interest in maintaining Denmark’s industrial
base and its place within Europe (defined at that pre-expansion point by what
we now think of as the old Europe). Watkins crams a lot into the film, and one
can easily get lost within it, but that’s a deliberate strategy too I think, mirroring
how the populace misses the incremental shifts that gradually shift the nature
of power and influence. Hindsight tells us that democracy didn’t crash as
rapidly as Watkins clearly expected it to, but if he was a pessimist on the
timing, maybe that only speaks to the self-preserving refinement of the
influences he diagnosed. It’s shocking that his work isn’t better known and
more consistently accessible.

The Amorous Misadventures of Casanova

Talking of Tony Curtis, I recently watched
another film from his fading star period, one which might surely have gone the
way of Where’s Parsifal and yet
somehow survives, a mind-boggling 1977 European mishmash called The Amorous Misadventures of Casanova,
among other things (shifting titles are a common feature of such misbegotten
projects, as if limply throwing darts at a target without a bullseye).
Sometimes it’s called Some Like it Cool,
which exactly points to how Curtis trashes his legacy here. He plays both an
aging Casanova with performance problems and a younger lookalike; the film
sends them on a strenuously intertwined plot of mix-ups, usually involving the
bedroom; much of the time, you have the impression of merely watching a tired
man delivering his anachronistic quips, propped up by a conveyor belt of boobs.

And yet (that’s right, even for a farrago
such as this you can find an “as yet,” if you’re a true optimist) by its very
nature, the film embodies a kind of joy in cinema that’s extinguished now, a
faith in the notion that the very presence of a Star, doing some vague version
of what he’s always done, is inherently magnetic; and in the allure of pretty
titillation. I don’t think it can ever have been entirely true, because such
films never seemed to do much for the career of anyone who appeared in them,
but the notion persisted for a long time, before being gradually killed off by
home video and then the Internet and the new attitudes that came with them.
Watching The Amorous Misadventures of
Casanova, I kept wondering how anyone thought that what I was looking at
was good, but I suppose that’s the wrong question – no one thought it had to be
good, it just had to be. And how easy then for such a film, maybe ten years or
even a day later, to cease to be.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).